Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

by

I’m wondering if i was really ready to leave. The Hospital. High School. The Womb. I am at once an intellectual being of savvy motivation and a blubbering mess — a mess of white noise and disorientation. Talking doesn’t seem to be working. I open my mouth and words come out like twisting kudzu vines, intent on covering over my tone, intent, and meaning. My words twist themselves in fumbling green shoots spreading out from me, at once repelling and rooting me where i stand.

My associations are tangled. My mother is floating on the periphery of my life again, wheedling her way in as best as she can down my through, into my stomach, twisting my insides into hard knots that do not come undone. But i am tugging, pulling my guts this way and that hoping that something will give. No one makes sense. I can’t explain my weekend to anyone in anything but stuttering halting words. They all blankly tell me: “We were so worried.”

We. Not anyone in specific, really.

Plenty of people were worried sick about me the whole time, but i wasn’t … wasn’t worried about me, or about them, or about anything. Everyone who said that all blended into each other today. Not one of them were specific. That same wall that i thought was keeping me away from my city is suddenly all around me. I am in an aquarium tapping on the glass. Or maybe not. Maybe i’m finally outside, or maybe i was always outside. Every conversation i slide into i am separate from… the smart one, the sheltered one, the childish one, the one going absolutely fucking nowhere as fast as he can.

I want to find a way to be as numb as i feel, but there is nothing like it that i know. Except — on Friday i was coming back up from a haze of Diprovan sleep, and it was a perfect numb; i have slivers of seconds cupped in my memory while others have slid from them like mercury. Last night i wanted to feel that obscurity, that disconnected. If all you have are a scattering of pieces, you can put it back together any way you’d like.

I could actually pretend to be somewhere where i wanted to be.

Today i woke up and was back here, with my vision fuzzed and my balance a smear and several shades off of my normal self. Class was a blur, like the roadside seen from a car window. I spent five minutes of class just sitting in a bathroom stall trying to figure it out. I hung on to my perfect score in Theory class, and it didn’t feel right. I hemmed and hawed over auditioning and i did and it didn’t even seem to matter.

It was like i wasn’t even on the stage.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7655997/

by

On on empty stomach and an hour out of the hospital i somehow decided that i needed to take a walk — if for any reason then to remind myself that there is such a thing of fresh air and that most streets are longer than the distance from my hospital bed to the elevator bank. So i walked.


Comparatively, my stay in the hospital will shrink and shrink away until it is finally nothing from a distance, and i swung out each leg in a wide arc in front of the other to add to that distance as i marched down Walnut street. The distance between here and class, that i am dreading the walk of right at this instant, evaporated away and i kept walking. Charging. In my head i was at a solid jog, feeling the in out in of my breath and watching as i passed everyone around me. Honestly, i couldn’t tell you if i was jogging or not.

I got past Drexel and suddenly i found myself at the highway; it borders the Schuylkill on the west side and metro Philadelphia rises in glittering tiers on the other side. Feet planted firm on the bridge, my city looked like an artist’s rendering of itself: flat and unchanging … detailed but with no depth. I don’t know how long i stood there staring at it staring back at me before i walked towards it. I expected to come up against a translucent sort of wall where i could run my hand against the shimmering image of the city and try to press through, but before i realized it i was past it and inside the image i had observed.

Somehow it was different. I still had that flavor of hospital in me, the tiny lines of adhesive from all of the tape that held in my IVs, the ID tag on my wrist. I hadn’t thought to take it off, honestly.


Every word i said came out the way it wasn’t meant, and i’m wondering if i was really ready to leave.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7634418/

by

I’ve got so many other things to talk about, but my window of internet access is almost over and the IV in my hand feels like it might fall right out if i typing this fast, so i’ll have to leave you in suspense until i make it home (or, until my mother uses her connections to get me some more black-market internet access). I promise to Trio sometime soon. Love ya – xoxoxo!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7562755/

by

A rare occurrence… me, my mother, and my father, talking about our respective colonoscopies. My mom is wearing a Madonna-style “New York” tank top and just bribed the food services people to bring me extra jello, my dad is wearing a denim shirt from his store that says “Pete’s Gun Shop” and brought me his 1960’s boxed set of Lord of the Rings, and i’m merrily clicking away as i assure them that Everclear would be a totally appropriate clear liquid to mix with my cranberry juice.


Yeah, we’re fucked up no matter how you slice it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7560454/

by

Don’t be alarmed about this or anything, alright? I mean, other than the mandatory fasting that had been imposed on me i’m not in any sort of discomfort or physical danger. Basically, i was convinced my appendix was exploding, the doctors were somewhat convinced my appendix was exploding, they admitted me, and it turned out to be something that was three centimeters away from my appendix (that shows no indication of explosion). Who knew?

My mom’s bringing back $20 of magazines since i read all the books and liner notes i have with me, and my Dad’s coming with pictures of his surgery, and i am intermittently getting calls from the admissions crew. So, it’s really like a vacation … i’ve definitely stayed in hotel rooms smaller than this. Sorta puts things into perspective… firstly, that i value my academic standing about three times more than i value my health and, secondly, that i need to be getting more out of life.

It’s not as those i’m having one of those epiphanies about being thankful and all that crap, because i am thankful for what i have. What i am realizing is that i’m twenty, and that after spending two decades in a state of nearly perfect health my body is finally starting to feel the wear and tear. I’ve never before had to seriously contemplate that — tiny degradations of vision and early-onset CTS aside i’m shockingly fit for someone who’s so ignorant of their own health.

Point being… it’s not that i should be more thankful, it’s that i should just be more.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7559464/